(Homewood Cemetery) Before I moved to Pittsburgh seven years ago a friend sent me a recording of a comic Yiddish patter song from the 1920s or ’30s. It was like one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s rapid-fire recitatives, only in Yiddish. I...

who will prosecute the wind’s unconstitutional surveillance of skin? hands up if they told you snowflakes speak for diversity. * I held my breath like a basketball passing through the projects to pan-am plaza. my sister concealed steel blades, a...

There ought to be a prayer for the little exhaustion of light where bullets worm clear through the apples clinging to limbs. There ought to be a prayer for the flesh they pass through, the space left, bits blown into grass, that they resemble teeth...

“Women have broken the glass ceiling, and we’ve achieved most of our goals.” When a female corporate vice president announced this at a leadership conference for women, before hundreds of female managers who worked for a Fortune 500 aerospace...

They had the number, Lalita divined. Now, sitting with her father and mother at the restaurant, looking at her father’s face, its flat surface smugly composed for once, instead of explosive with rage, Lalita was sure of it. Her parents, having never...

Unlike me, she made a choice, chose Indian over Chinese, because she felt she looked more Indian than Chinese. It “takes strength” to choose. At age five, while playing near her feet, my grandmother knitted sweaters for me because she was always...

There’s a line in the film Casablanca where the character Lisa says, “It’s a crazy world, anything can happen.” This is true of course for many reasons but most recently because Donald Trump was elected president. I was thinking of that scene...

We had been standing in line for hours. Days. Months. It felt like we had been standing since the beginning of thought or reason, for centuries. Some of us had been waiting, every hour, every minute, for two years. The waiting, the desire to vote...